As companied grow through different projects, departments, countries, and business organizations, it becomes more difficult to ensure that the financial information is correct and available. The concept of Xledger is finance need not be that difficult.

Xledger offers a cloud ERP solution intended for middle market and larger enterprises with intricate financial needs. Their solution brings accounting, reporting, automation, project management, procurement, payments, budgeting, and multi-entity management into one single environment.  The company supports more than 10,000 organizations across over 60 countries.

The story behind the company goes back to 1996, when software architect Jarle Sky moved to Palo Alto and saw the potential of web-based business systems. That vision eventually led him, along with May Helen Kvarberg and Lennart Holen, to establish Xledger in 2000. The company's cloud ERP launched in 2006, at a time when cloud-based business software was still developing into the mainstream model it is today.

Bringing Core Finance Into One Place

The Xledger accounting platform lies at the core of the system. Instead of looking at accounting as different processes, the system connects the general ledger to the accounts payable, accounts receivable, bank account management, asset management, transaction management, and more financial activities.

The real time ledger of the system can accommodate dimensions such as department, projects, and funds, and rules based posting, automatic accruals, prepayments, depreciation and bank reconciliation might help in reducing manual processing. The users can drill down from reports to the source transactions, thus maintaining a better audit trail.

This would be especially valuable for organizations having more than one company or business unit. Xledger gives you consolidation, currency translation, inter-company accounting, elimination, and ownership structure, thus enabling you to view the financial information at the group level without using any external spreadsheet or software.

Reporting That Goes Beyond the Spreadsheet

Financial information becomes useful if it is usable. Xledger has a very good approach towards real time reporting and business intelligence.

It offers dashboards that enable organizations to prepare their financial reports and provide interactive views with drill down facility. Role based information can be provided to different users like management and directors as well as to budget owners. The system can also interface with external data warehouses.

For project focused organizations, this transparency may be important. In Xledger, the features of project accounting, time tracking, expense tracking, work in process management, resource planning and project invoicing come together. With these features, professional service organizations can determine project margin, measure utilization, detect overages, and automate invoicing.

Connecting the Systems Businesses Already Use

It is important to note that Xledger does not market itself as a stand-alone finance tool. The open API and ability to integrate allow linking up the finance tool with the whole technology stack.

Some of the integration points include CRM, banking, payroll, payments, and data warehousing among others. This strategy will enable enterprises to consolidate information as opposed to having many disparate sources of financial data.

This kind of flexibility is important given that enterprises today run specialized applications. Finance can remain the central source of financial truth while other systems continue doing what they do best.

Supporting Different Industries and Complex Organizations

Xledger's focus extends across sectors where financial structures can become complicated. Its industry solutions include education, finance, professional services, technology, energy, hospitality, real estate, senior care, associations, arts & culture, and non profit industries.

Education institutions, for example, get supported by Xledger with budgeting, procurement approvals, grant reporting, and financial visibility across entities. For charities and foundations, its platform provides fund accounting, grant management, donor reports, and consolidation. For real estate, Xledger enables entity-based reporting, accounts payable automation, vendor management, and group consolidation.

Complexity is what ties everything together. Xledger is built for organizations that have moved beyond basic accounting software and require their finances to be managed on an broader structure.

Looking Beyond Finance With ESG and Carbon Reporting

Another interesting direction is Xledger's move into carbon accounting and ESG reporting. Its platform can use information already held within the finance system to support emissions calculations and reporting.

The carbon accounting module is designed to track and report Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, support ESRS-related reporting, and provide views ranging from company-wide information to individual projects, suppliers, and categories.

This reflects a wider shift in corporate finance. Financial data is no longer only about revenue, costs, and profit. Increasingly, organisations need connected information about sustainability, compliance, risk, and operational performance too.

A More Connected Future for Finance

Future Plans of Xledger will be highly linked to future trends in business finance such as automation, connectivity and decreased reliance on manual activities. It being a cloud-native platform gives the benefit of automatic updates to the clients whereas its multi-entity design is built to help companies scale their businesses.

With further development of artificial intelligence, intelligent automation, sustainability reporting, and connected enterprise systems, the finance platform can turn into an operating layer of a modern enterprise. Xledger's original cloud-first vision was built around that kind of change. Its future will depend on how effectively it continues turning complex financial information into something businesses can actually understand and act on.

Jarle Sky | Founder

“Whatever your integration needs, Xledger’s capabilities mean that consolidating, processing and making sense of your business data needn’t be a manual or time-consuming task.”